Although applicable in principal to any system that requires broadband signal amplification, the present invention and its underlying problem will be hereinafter described in combination with broadband amplifiers with instantaneous bandwidth regarding the incoming signal.
In modern electronics applications frequencies of data transmission signals continuously rise with increased bandwidth requirements. Further additional applications, like e.g. wireless sensor networks or the like emerge, that use frequency bands, e.g. in the range of 2-8 GHz.
Especially during development and conformance testing of devices for such modern applications, it is therefore necessary to be able to cope with and e.g. measure or generate high bandwidth signals e.g. from some MHz to some GHz, like e.g. from 10 MHz to 10 GHz.
Common amplifier arrangements for such applications usually comprise a plurality of high bandwidth or broadband amplifiers with the same frequency range. Combiners, like e.g. a Wilkinson coupler, a n*λ/4 coupled, or a Branchline coupler, a Guanella coupler or a Marchand coupler are usually used to combine the signals of the single broadband amplifiers.
However, these couplers are bandwidth limited and require that the individual broadband amplifiers all cover the entire frequency band of interest. Further, all broadband amplifiers must run with equal phase and amplitude frequency response.
Such arrangements are therefore complex and expensive.